Zen Pinball Review

The best pinball game on PSN. By default.

The humble pinball machine has had its day, but it lives on in digital form for every videogame platform around. The PlayStation Network has received its first silver ball simulation, Zen Pinball, and it's a good one. There are certain things a digital version of this arcade game needs to get right in order to satisfy enthusiasts. Zen Pinball fulfills most of this criteria with its realistic physics and includes quality tables and a slew of bonus features that make for fun online competitions. It was developed by Zen Studios and is actually quite a bit better than the pinball game the studio made for Xbox Live Arcade, Pinball FX.

What we have here are four original tables with the promise of more to come as downloadable content. As ever, your goal is to rack up a high score by keeping a ball in play with just the side flippers. You can also give the table a nudge with the analog sticks, although it's a bit baffling that this function wasn't mapped to Sixaxis. The PlayStation 3 controller's motion-sensing capabilities are generally stupid, but this is one case where they would seem to make sense.

The tables are all fun to play, look great, and are hiding all sorts of secrets you'll need to discover if you're going to rack up a high score. Each table comes with its own rule sheet that will explain how the different areas of the machine work and how to manipulate it. Brave pinball super fans can delve into the operating menus and tweak the factory settings, check bookkeeping records, and adjust difficulty levels. The operating menu uses the table's dot matrix display as its interface. Zen has put a lot of care into crafting these tables.

Getting a good view of the table is often a problem in video pinball, but Zen Pinball handles it pretty well. There are six different camera angles, some that follow the ball and some that are fixed. Players should be able to find an angle that suits them. If the dot matrix score display is in your way you can move it around the screen, shrink it, or do away with it completely.

Zen Pinball was made to be a communal experience and it's filled with friendly ways to interact with other players. First, there are the extensive online scoreboards that track everyone's high scores, best one-minute scores, and score speed. The one-minute score is how many points you rack up in your first minute of play, and the score speed is your average points per second. While maneuvering menus and waiting for a game to load (tables do take a few moments to load, by the way) you are fed up-to-the minute updates on how people are performing online. The menus are also slick, designed to look like various parts of a pinball table. Switching between menus sees the camera moving to another area of the table rather than loading a new screen.

Then there are the feature-heavy multiplayer modes. Players can engage in either local hotseat or online multiplayer battles. During a local match, players take turns shooting each of their balls, just as they would if they were crowded around an actual pinball machine at an arcade. But the online games are a bit more interesting. Here, everyone plays at the same time in a race to reach a target score (set by the host). You have unlimited balls but each lost ball results in a score penalty. Zen Pinball supports the PlayStation Eye so you can video chat during a game. Very cool stuff.

Official tournaments will be held from time to time, indicated by a flashing Tournament option on the main menu.

The Verdict

Zen Pinball is a great social experience for the PlayStation Network. It gets video pinball right, and then adds a bunch of compelling competitive features for both local and online play. The menus are slick, the tables are inventive, and there are fun extras like slow motion available. It's impossible for video pinball to truly replicate the experience of a real table, but Zen Pinball makes up for that with new features that you don't get with the real thing. This is one of the best video pinball games around.